I believe a culture of trust today is more essential than it's ever been and we live in an interesting time with digital technology we basically have full transparency to information and I think there's a higher expectation amongst individuals is to know to be included to basically be part of the conversation I think as leaders today more than ever we need to have transparency to build trust in the organizations we lead we have what I was starting out you know basically as an employee you had very little access to information companies would do annual reports or
their shareholder newsletter and I think that today to attract and retain the best talent people need to understand decisions corporations need to embrace a greater level of transparency in terms of sharing information with their employees companies that basically share this information are going to have greater loyalty greater shareholder return and harder working employees if information is power why would I not want to give more information to my people to make them as powerful as possible to help our businesses grow and help succeed in the marketplace but then you have the converse what if it's bad
news what if this quarter what we're sharing is potential layoffs or potential downside and there was actually a child psychology study where they looked at children who were told and aware of issues and then they had parent come in and lie to them and basically tell them everything was okay everything's fine don't worry about it and they studied and looked at actually children's stress levels during this experiment and ironically when given reassurance stress levels spiked and the reason is people children are perceptive they know when bad is happening they see it in your face they
see it how the organization carries and what the study basically found was the spike was an erosion of trust people are aware of the bad and if you're not as a leader communicating telling the story managing information people are going to make up stories on their own so my experience is while you do create distraction when bad occurs it's infinitely less than the distraction that would naturally occur and say nothing one of the ways we try to embrace a culture of transparency is to actually create news tools to get better input and one of the
things we're using right now is a tool called tiny pulse tiny pulse is an electronic survey that we take on a weekly or bi-weekly basis of all our employees and it's questions of how happy are you what's preventing you from doing a good job what are the things that basically give you energy I think transparency is a two-way street so using a tool like tiny pulse allows us to literally take the pulse of the organization and see what's on people's minds what's their concerns the whole thing is anonymous and for me as a leader to
have the ability to then be able to address specific needs you might think about it as sensing and responding to employees needs wants and desires versus just announcing from a bully pulpit what I think is important the idea there of people sharing information but then you as a leader responding information with truthful honest feedback creates actions that build trust build longevity and built oil tea I think that organizations that practice transparency that earn trust have a little bit more leeway to basically learn and evolve so again yes there are challenges and there's investment required to
build trust and transparency but the commitments and brand loyalty and employee loyalty I believe and have seen far outweigh all the investment that's required you
